Adam Balic

Went fishing on Sunday, so I made a dinner of Blue Trout, steamed potatoes and buttered snowpeas. This is the fish pre-blueing. After the blueing process.

O.K. I am going to cook some "Moroccan" food tonight. Well almost. The mains are going to be an older form of Mrouzia and a bastardised version of Paula's "Seafood Bisteeya" (I went fishing on Sunday). I have a copy of the Charles Perry et al. "Mediaval Arabic Cooking", which is quite fun and interesting to cook from. In the 14th century "Description of Familiar things" there is a recipe for Marwaziyya, which is named for the central asian city of Merv and is an thought to be an ancestor of the North African feast dish Mrouzia. My version of the recipe is: 1.5 kg meat (lamb) 500 gm onions (grated) 2.5 ounces raisins 2 ounces of jujubes* 6 ounces of prunes vinegar mint mixed spices saffron sugar Mix meat with spices and onion, rest overnight. Gently heat the meat mixture until fragrant Add pre-soaked fruit Cook for 1.5-2.0 hours, add sugar/vinegar syrup to taste. Adjust seasoning with more spices, salt and mint, glaze under the grill and leave to settle for 10 minutes or so. I comparison of this recipe and the extant version shows some interesting differences, the use vinegar and sugar instead of honey. The spice mixture is unknown, so I am going to male mu own. Jububes are often called Chinese or Red dates and although they look like this they are not related to dates and are the fruit of the shrub Ziziphus jujuba. They taste similar to dates though. This is my tagine, which I bought in Meknes, it is about 40 cm wide at the base. I have no idea if it is a particular traditional style or if it just a tourist item, but I was very happy to get it back to Scotland intact on a backpacking holiday.

Une vrai tartiflette must have cured savoyard ham or it is a cheap shadow of real Alpine cuisine! (Is that they one does it on the French boards, P'titPois?) ← Sorry — some time ago I decided that I would never discuss about tartiflette anymore, and you can see that I have made a tremendous effort with clafoutis. On my food forum (in French), both words are booby-trapped! Only those two words. Seriously, I can tell you about the pela des Aravis, a traditional recipe that evolved recently into a touristy dish called "tartiflette", but AFAIK there is no such thing as a "vraie tartiflette". For a pela, you need a nice ripe reblochon, diced potatoes and onions. The potatoes should be slowly roasted in butter with the onions, salt and pepper until they're nice and golden, almost soft. This already takes about half an hour. The potatoes should not stick to the pan. Cut off some of the crust of the reblochon (at angles), scrub the remainder. Cut the reblochon in half horizontally like a layered cake and just lay both halves on the potatoes, cut side down. Leave the pan on very low heat and just forget about the whole thing for about 45 minutes or a bit more (NEVER stir), until the reblochon is melted and only a layer of warm crust covers the potatoes. Cut into pieces with a spatula and serve with a well-vinegared and shalloty green salad. No ham, no bacon, no herbs, no oven. Just that. What makes a pela interesting is the different stages of melted reblochon that can be found simultaneously in one serving: creamy and soft, crusty and pungent, and lightly browned and crunchy. ← Oh my God. When I was in Wales recently I made a "tartiflette" in almost exactly this manner. The only difference was that as I was using Le Ratte potatoes I par-steamed them and I put a little white wine into the gratin, so that the melted cheese combined with this make a 'sauce'. I was being ordered about by some Frenchies from Grenoble, so maybe this helped.

Ah, that is good to know, as you know the default in the UK is to use 'real' cinnamon.

A quick question regarding cinnamon in North African cooking. Is there a prefered type to be used? In various recipes I see mention of both Ceylon cinnamon (Cinnamomum zeylanicum) and cassia/Chinese cinnamon (Cinnamomum cassia), but sometimes I'm not clear on which one to use.

← That's pretty good marketing as by April 10, 1663 Pepys wrote "There I drank a sort of French wine called Ho-Bryan (sic) which hath a good and most particular taste which I never before encountered....." My memory is that this is just after the period when that the red wines of Bordeaux changed from fairly simply and pale wines (hence "Claret" = clear, light, bright, modern French = "clairet") to more modern type wines (although fully modern type wines proberly had to wait until corks where used).

So it was YOU! You never know who's reading the boards. What year was this? ← 2000. It was my honeymoon, which means that it is O.K. Stolen fruit always tastes better.

Guilty! good Lord! If I were to include guilt in my experience of cooking I think I'd chose another occupation. As for "traditional" clafoutis, I've had many opportunities to discuss this so I am not going to start again, but it is a country recipe, of which many versions exist, and I think one should not be too rigid in defining "the real authentic recipe of (this or that)". In the case of clafoutis, well, black cherries - OK, sure, but when you had other cherries on hand, well you used them and nobody felt guilty about this. And what do you do in Auvergne when you want to make a clafoutis in Winter? Well you use raisins soaked in rum. And so on. ← My understanding (which is often off) is the clafoutis belongs to a class of similar flan type dishes and that the exact filling changes from region to region. I have a recipe for one that is just the egg custard flavoured with lemon and it is v.good. Also is it correct that originally clafoutis was made in a cabbage leaf? I love clafoutis. Brings back happy memories of stealing cherrys in the Macon.

A couple of people are coming for dinner on Tuesday and I think that I shall make tagine. I have a 14th C. Arabic recipe for Mrouzia (thanks to Charles Perry's translations) and are interested in producing this. I also have a digital probe and a tagine from Meknes, so I will take some measurements and photos etc. I am actually quite interested to see the temperature in this cooking vessel, pity I don't have pressure probe though.

Lucy - the full name of the dish is"Choucroute de navets a'la Colmar". I haven't seen it anywhere but in Alsace. I imagine that it like thousands of other regional dishes in France, they only become "French" once they are disseminated outwith their region of origin. This may occur though spreading of the dish to other regions (choucroute being served in Paris for instance) or by the knowledge of the existance a particular dish (in cases where the dish remains local in production). But in all these cases I would think that these dishes would keep there regional appellation.

See your problem is scale. 11.1 compared to 11.2 is really quite significant you know.

Thanks for that resource. I just looked it up and will probably get it soon. Plotkin would get into a frenzy seeing that book though (not that I'd agree with him). He's a pretty passionate guy, if that hasn't been made clear. He gets huffy when the French and Italian riverias are thrown together. He also clearly has a bone to pick with Venice, first comparing it (unfavorably) to Genoa and then in Terra Fortunata he dismisses it when compared to Trieste. ← Garibaldi was from around Nice and didn't speak very good Italian (spoke a Ligurian dilect apparently). Different, by related. The is also a good book on the cooking of Nice, written by the Major who moved to Brazil for legal reasons.

Ivan - only two? I have always considered you a two epiphanies before breakfast type of guy. I have had an English epiphany - my first Kings Pork Pie. Dude - it occurs to me that we should rank these epiphanies.

Does 'indefinate leave to stay' count? I get the impression with British food that like an iceberg it is present and powerful, but the interesting bits are mostly unseen. A good place to start maybe this book. British Food

Should I report this to the UK forum as you reported the French thread here in the Italian corner of egullet? The true tragedy is that they'd probably agree with you. They'd be wrong, but they'd still agree with you. ← Actually, I don't agree with this. I think that British cuisine and especially the produce can be brilliant. It's just a pity that so few people cook it.

Well, Bleudauvergne agreed with you (as do I) and she's got total cred, so you must have been right. And, to your second comment, a little too seriously. I threw the fork comment in as a jest aimed at the metastacizing French chauvanism (apt word, non?) emerging on that thread and was a little amused at how seriously it was taken. ← Sorry I must use more emoticons. For the record, please mentally insert "ironic 30-something post-modern cynical self-absorbtion" emoticon after any comment that I make.

Au contraire, mon ami. On the French cooking thread, much bandwith has been used to praise France's non-haute cuisine -- as it should be. I think a far better indicator of the strength of a country's cooking is the performance of their mid-level restaurants and the quality of what grandmas, aunts and moms lay out on feast days. I think that's a pretty common idea, hear on eGullet and with some of the great food sriters, like A.J. Liebling and MFK Fisher. what a bunch of swells are eating at a Micheline 3-star is no more indicative of the overall quality of a nation's food than what a bunch of corporate CEO's is of a nations economy. My personal view would be that the strength of a countrys cooking can be based on the amount of interest shown in food by the inhabitants of that country. This is not to say that I can nessarily agree with or appreciate what they are talking about. The problem with French cuisine is that this 'epithany' event seems to turn some people into poor-mans verions of Waverly Root or MFK Fisher. What should be a humble acknowledgment of the abolute joys of developing passion for food, somehow ends up as another form of self protective egotism.

No, I decided that and what do I know. I think that everybody else is talking about tomatos, forks and epithany. People take food very seriously don't they?

I enjoy the regionality of French cuisine. One thing that I have noted is how specific a dish can be to a very local region. The other night I cooked a choucroute recipe from Colmar. The interesting this about it is that it contains no cabbage, but brined turnip instead. I have noticed the same thing over and over again. So while this recipe may come from France, I'm not convinced that it could be called "French"?

It's been said before and it has also been said recently that the best food destination in the moment is London. I would think that is comes down to a matter of perspective. Many people see a food experience as a dining experience and there is some cause for the opinion that Italian* food does not shoe-horn well into the most popular extant model of fine dining. Not something that I can comment on in an informed way. Possibly, there exists people that can see a food experience outwith the context of a dining experience or at least outwith the the small percentage of dining experiences at the very top. For these people Italian food may have something to offer. However, I think that this may be quite rare as it is much more common for people to ask "What are the best restuarants in X?", rather then "What are the interesting food related things to do in X?". *Not sure what is ment by "Italian food", seems a bit of a broad brush to using for a country that is noted for its regionality in food (when anybody has anything good to say about it).

In terms of French home cooking, is there a French 'cuisine' or is it more regional?

Philip - that is very good news indeed, thank you for the information. After reading the issues in Brighton, I found the whole British food thing depressing, but this is very positive information. Scotland has some of the best produce in the world and it will be fantastic to see it consumed locally.

This is a very good point. Edinburgh has a similar twice-monthly farmers market, and as nice as it is, it really is just a middle-class nice morning out rather then meeting the needs of the wider community as you say. Not sure about the rest of the country? Are there any good daily (or at least regular then twice a month) markets in the UK that cater to more then just on section of the community?

Very nice Kevin, I really like the food of Liguria and the Riviera in general (Colman Andrews has published a good book on the food from this area BTW). Actually the in Liguria they do have a chickpea flour pancake. It is called 'farinata' and very similar (if not the same) as 'socca' from Nice and also a similar pancake from Sicily.

V.cool. I haven't tried this, but now I am keen. Do you think that it would be possible to use the shells of shrimp? The have a lot of flavour (you can buy the the shells of tiny shrimp in most Asian grocers here) and I wonder if you toasted these and reduced them to a powder you could incorporate these and get even more flavour in. Or used a proportion of dried shrimp even? I have most commonly seen these in SE-Asian recipes/restuarants, the ones common as chinese take-away freebies in the UK are pretty crap, but you can buy quite good ones produced in Indonesia (20-30% shrimp).